common species: every part of our language, as of every other, is full of such examples—but, when once the name is applied, it belongs to that to which it is applied, and no longer to its relatives by etymology; its origin is neglected, and its form may be gradually changed beyond recognition, or its meaning so far altered that comparison with the original shall seem a joke or an absurdity. This is a regular and essential part of the process of name-making in all human speech, and from the very beginning of the history of speech: in fact (as pointed out above), the latter can only be said to have begun when this process was successfully initiated, when uttered signs began to be, what they have ever since continued to be, conventional, or dependent only on a mutual understanding. Thus alone did language gain the capacity of unlimited growth and development. The sphere and scope of natural expression are narrowly bounded, but there is no end to the resources of conventional sign-making.
It is well to point out here that this change of the basis of men’s communication from natural suggestiveness to mutual understanding, and the consequent purely conventional character of all human language, in its every part and particle, puts an absolute line of demarcation between the latter and the means of communicationBrute Speech and Human Speech. of all the lower animals The two are not of the same kind, any more than human society in its variety of organization is of the same kind with the instinctive herding of wild cattle or swarming of insects, any more than human architecture with the instinctive burrowing of the fox and nest building of the bird, any more than human industry and accumulation of capital with the instinctive hoarding of bees and beavers In all these cases alike the action of men is a result of the adaptation of means at hand to the satisfaction of felt needs, or of purposes dimly perceived at first, but growing clearer with gradually acquired experience. Man is the only being that has established institutions—gradually accumulated and perfected results of the exercise of powers analogous in kind to, but greatly differing in degree from, those of the lower animals. The difference in degree of endowment does not constitute the difference in language, it only leads to it. There was a time when all existing human beings were as destitute of language as the dog; and that time would come again for any number of human beings who should be cut off (if that were practicable) from all instruction by their fellows: only they would at once proceed to recreate language, society and arts by the same steps by which their own remote ancestors created those which we now possess; while the dog would remain what he and his ancestors have always been, a creature of very superior intelligence, indeed, as compared with most, of infinite intelligence as compared with many, yet incapable of rising by the acquisition of culture through the formation and development of traditional institutions. There is just the same saltus existent in the difference between man’s conventional speech and the natural communication of the lower races as in that between men’s forms of society and the instinctive associations of the lower races; but it is no greater and no other, it is neither more absolute and characteristic nor more difficult to explain. Hence those who put forward language as the distinction between man and the lower animals, and those who look upon our language as the same in kind with the means of communication of the lower animals, only much more complete and perfect, fail alike to comprehend the true nature of language, and are alike wrong in their arguments and conclusions. No addition to or multiplication of brute speech would make anything like human speech; the two are separated by a step which no animal below man has ever taken; and, on the other hand, language is only the most conspicuous among those institutions the development of which has constituted human progress, while their possession constitutes human culture.
With the question of the origin of man, whether or not developed out of lower animal forms, intermediate to the anthropoid apes, language has nothing to do, nor can its study ever be made to contribute anything to the solution of that question. If there once existed creatures above the apes and below man, who were extirpated by primitive man as his especial rivals in the struggle for existence, or became extinct in any other way, there is no difficulty in supposing them to have possessed forms of speech, more rudimentary and imperfect than ours At any rate, all existing human speech is one in the essential characteristics which we have thus far noted or shall hereafter have to consider, even as humanity is one in its distinction from the lower animals; the differences are in non-essentials. Language and Culture. All speech is one in the sense that every human being, of whatever race he may be, is capable of Language acquiring any existing tongue, and of using it for and the same purposes for which its present possessors use it, with such power and effect as his individual capacity allows, and without any essential change in the mental operations carried on by means of speech—even as he may acquire any other of the items of culture belonging to a race not his own The difference between employing one language and another is like that between employing one instrument and another in mechanical arts; one instrument may be better than another, and may enable its user to turn out better work, but the human ingenuity behind both is the same, and works in the same way. Nor has the making of language anything whatever to do with making man what he is, as an animal species having a certain physical form and intellectual endowment. Being what he is by nature, man has by the development of language and other institutions become what he is by culture. His acquired culture is the necessary result of his native endowment, not the contrary. The acquisition of the first stumbling beginnings of a superior means of communication had no more influence to raise him from a simian to a human being than the present high culture and perfected speech of certain races has to lift them up to something more than human and specifically different from the races of inferior culture. It cannot be too absolutely laid down that differences of language, down to the possession of language at all, are differences only in respect to education and culture.
How long man, after he came into such being as he now is, physically and intellectually, continued to communicate with imitative signs of direct significance, when the production of traditional signs began, how rapidly they were accumulated, and how long any traces of their imitative origin clave to them—these and the Development of Language-signs. like questions it is at present idle to try to answer even conjecturally; just as it is to seek to determine when the first instruments were used, how soon they were shaped instead of being left crude, at what epoch fire was reduced to service, and so on. The stages of development and their succession are clear enough; to fix their chronology will doubtless never be found practicable. There is much reason for holding, as some do, that the very first items of culture were hardest to win and cost most time, the rate of accumulation (as in the case of capital) increasing with the amount accumulated Beyond all reasonable question, however, there was a positively long period of purely imitative signs, and a longer one of mixed imitative and traditional ones, the latter gradually gaining upon the former, before the present condition of things was reached, when the production of new signs by imitation is only sporadic and of the utmost rarity, and all language-signs besides are traditional, their increase in any community being solely by variation and combination, and by borrowing from other communities.
Of what nature, in various respects, this earliest language material was is sufficiently clear. The signs, in the first place, were of the sort that we call “roots” By this is only meant that they were integral signs, significant in their entirety, not divisible into parts, of which one signified one thing and another another thing, or of which one The Root-stage. gave the main significance, while another was an added sign of kind or relation. In a language of developed structure like our own, we arrive at such “roots” mainly by an artificial stripping off of the signs of relation which almost every word still has, or can be shown to have once had. In un-cost-li-ness, for example, cost is the centrally significant element; so far as English is
